January 31, 2016

Our only stop in Botswana (after a 5 hour hold-up at the border and 12 hours of driving) was at Nata, to visit the Makgadikgadi salt pan. When we visited, the pans were dry with only a few birds and wildebeest, but there are more animals when it rains and they become wet and grassy.

January 28, 2016

Some more safari! We spent two nights in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. The campsites in the Kruger are much more swank than the ones I stayed in in Tanzania - they're basically resorts, with pools and restaurants. Most importantly, they are fenced off, so I slept pretty well without hyenas cackling in my ears. I found, over the rest of the week, that I can handle camping pretty well if there's a fence and a good bathroom.

January 26, 2016

A bit of a misleading title - we only spent one day in Johannesburg, before we started our overland trip up to Victoria Falls. So this post is a little bit of Joburg, and a little bit of what we saw on the way to Kruger park.

January 23, 2016

Our last day on safari was spent in the Ngorongoro Crater. It's technically a caldera, not a crater, as it was formed by a collapsed volcano. It's actually one of the coolest things I've ever seen - it's pretty much a giant bowl filled with animals, like a natural zoo.

January 20, 2016

I think I've been most excited to post the photos from the safari I went on in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater! One of the reasons I chose to go to Tanzania was because I was dying to go on safari, so this was one of the coolest weekends of my life. We spent two days in the Serengeti and our third day in the Ngorongoro crater.

January 16, 2016

We spent our second night in Stone Town, the old part of Zanzibar City. It's a World Heritage site because of its history and architecture, which has Arab influences. The streets are narrow and it's easy to get lost (as we did) - kind of like Venice, but with no canals. It was amazing to walk around here, it's very atmospheric when the streets are almost deserted and the call to prayer is being played on speakers.

January 13, 2016

On our first day in Arusha, we went into town and booked plane tickets to Zanzibar, where we spent our first weekend. Zanzibar is an island (or two main islands, rather) off the coast of Tanzania, famous for beautiful beaches and Stone Town. We spent our first day and night on the beach at Nungwi, which is white sand and beautiful. There was definitely something magical about the lighting there.

January 10, 2016

Hello! I have been reunited with my laptop and am currently writing this post from Madrid. These past six weeks have been pretty insane, but I'm going to start from the top - my time in Arusha, Tanzania, where I spent a month doing a hospital placement.

The city centre of Arusha is small, but bustling (crossing the road is terrifying). It does get a fair amount of tourist traffic as it's near the safari routes. I was living in a big house a little way out of the centre with a bunch of other healthcare students who were all working at the same hospital as me. I was pretty terrified at the beginning - I'd never stayed in any place this different from home for this amount of time, but I feel like I ended up semi-adapting (with a lot of help from new friends). I only managed to learn a minimal amount of Swahili, but I'm still finding some words and phrases slipping out now - hapana asante, sawa sawa, and mzungu (my favourite).

January 3, 2016

Who doesn't love a good view? One of my favourite things to do in a new city is to see it from above. Here are a couple of good ones - I realise that three of them were also places features in my seven wonders post, so I guess I just really appreciated those cities.

1. NYC from the top of the Empire State or Top of the Rock.

2. Rio from Christ the Redeemer.

3. Prague from behind the Strahov Monastery.

4. Heidelberg from Heidelberg Castle.

5. San Francisco from the top of Lombard St.

6. Lantau Island, HK from the cable car.

7. Sydney from Sydney Tower. Gotta have some hometown pride!

This is a scheduled post, I'm currently travelling overseas. I'll be reading your comments via email but won't be able to reply immediately. Happy New Year!